Week 7: Machine Guns and Rockets

Well let me tell you, if you every wanted to fire a machine gun a lot, this is certainly the week for you. But before you get to do all that awesome stuff you need to take your first RPFT at the one mile track! They do grade pretty tough and try to recreate Ranger School, but its not to hard. I'm not sure about the company but no one in our platoon failed. The toughest part for people was the 5 mile run, but even the slowest came it with a minute to spare. Also if you can do any of the following you will get a major positive (100 push ups, 100 sit ups, 5 mile in less than 32:00, and 20 pull ups) so in theory you could get 20 extra points if you were a super stud. No one in the company got more than two. Anyways the sucky part is the RPFT starts at 0400. And I mean people are doing push ups at 0400 so we had to be there at 0330. Not the coolest way to start the week. After the RPFT Monday morning is mostly in the classroom and a little preparation for the week. Our platoon checked out eight 240B's, twelve M249's,  two .50 cal's, and two MK-19's. Suffice to say if we went to combat like that... it would suck carrying everything. Monday afternoon is a familiarization fire on the crew served weapons which is pretty cool if you've never fired them before, and a few more in depth classes on the machine guns. That evening we had classes on the different rockets and missiles used by the infantry. Not too exciting, but most of the instructors were pretty good so the time went by fast. Tuesday was an awesome day. Basically we got to blow stuff up. For whatever reason our class was the first IBOLC class to get to shoot AT-4's and boy did we shoot a lot of them. I think the whole company shot somewhere around 80 (There are about 120 in the whole company), and it did look pretty cool to see eight or nine rockets hit the same target at once. On the other hand a few of my classmates really struggled and probably couldnt hit the broad side of a barn with those things. Until I fired a live one I had no idea how much of a "whoosh" there really was. They also let us shoot live rounds out of the M203's, which was a lot more fun than I anticipated to be honest. I should have mentioned that before you fired anything that blew up you did a whole lot of either dry firing or firing with some sort of non lethal ammunition (chalk or balls or something). That afternoon the assigned gunners from each squad zeroed on their weapons. I had been assigned as a main gunner for the 240 and zeroing was a lot easier than I expected. For those that did it, it went faster than when we did the M4's. The next two days and nights were spent qualifying on the weapons systems. Kind of life qualifying with the M4's except the closest target is at 400 meters and the farthest was at 1000 meters. To be honest I couldnt even see anything past 800 and neither could my assistant gunner so I never even tried to shoot at them. But its not too difficult and most people qualified after their second try. Then on Wednesday night the entire company will do a familiarization fire with all tracers in the M249. It flies through and we were changing barrels every minute and they were still getting super hot. Oh and dont be a dumb ass and touch the hot barrels. They say it a million times but someone always gets a pretty nasty burn. Then Thursday morning is spent making sure all those that still need to qualify are, and other tasks. You return back to the company Thursday afternoon, but youll be cleaning all night. Literally. We had a rotation with the squads, but you only had an hour to go home. Not really to sleep, just to drop your gear and take a shower, and grab a bite. Friday all day is just cleaning. Youll get released when you finish. It took us until 1800.